Artist Statement
I work alone along the coasts of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. I have been doing so since 2007 when I started drawing directly in the Pacific in Mexico after a near death experience while surfing.
Immersion with the ocean and nature is central to my practice, as is the notion and experience of the journey. I do not work in a studio. My work straddles the performative and the conceptual, the experimental and process and material-based inquiries into how I experience time, place, space, the sublime, the ineffable, the transient, the impermanent, the romantic, the mysterious and the poetic.
I work directly with the mystical elements, dimensions and truths that shape and inform our experience and understanding of who and where we are in the universe. I work across different ways of image making and continuously discover that a drawing can take me to places that a painting cannot while, similarly, video may be more susceptible to capturing something that drawing, even after hours and hours drifting in the ocean, may elude. My process of working in solitude in the ocean is defined and informed by the poetic blending of rituals, dreams, the spirit world, chanting, intuition, superstition, the paranormal and the diversity of fringe and earth sciences while moving and responding to what is happening in our contemporary world.
Since 2016, I have been taking my paintings to a larger scale and incorporating found objects into the making process, visually and materially, and also sewing pieces and fragments of paintings made in different countries and ocean bodies together into one painting.
Painting and drawing make up the core interest in visual arts, with photography happening instinctively and reflexively as a shotgun style way of working as I drive about, transfer places, explore new ground and sometimes revisit places I have been before only to find them, of course, changed and altered, grown up, gone or precariously in a state of flux.
I am drawn to the hinterlands of where the ocean and landscape merge as much as the shoreline itself. I am fascinated with non-spaces and non-places that coexist, often metaphysically or mystically in a textured and tactile way between the places and spaces that we know well, or between the a to b routes and lines, excursions and travels that we make. I find my work as an artist in those places and spaces, they are where I dwell and hang out, where I find my motivation to image make.
Recent artist interview below.
Somewhere alone on the Pacific coast of Peru, January, 2022